Al Gore is the principal prophet of doom in the global warming debate, and the 2006 documentary An Inconvenient Truth is his gospel to true believers. But Gore has misled them.

Two years ago, British High Court Justice Michael Burton characterized Gore’s film as “alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis.” The court, responding to a case filed by a parent, said the film was “one-sided” and could not be shown in British schools unless it contained guidelines to balance Gore’s attempt at “political indoctrination.”

The judge based his decision on nine inaccuracies in the movie. The Gore-loving U.S. media largely ignored the story, but starting premiere night Oct. 18, Americans will hear it in Not Evil Just Wrong. To set the stage, here is a recap of Gore’s claims and why they are flawed:

The claim: Melting in Greenland or West Antarctica will cause sea levels to rise up to 20 feet in the near future. The truth: The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change concluded that sea levels might rise 20 feet over millennia — and it waffled on that prediction. The IPCC envisions a rise of no more than 7 inches to 23 inches by 2100. Gore’s claim is “a very disturbing misstatement of the science,” John Day, who argued the British case, says in Not Evil Just Wrong. The judge said Gore’s point “is not in line with the scientific consensus.

The claim: Polar bears are drowning because they have to swim farther to find ice. The truth: Justice Burton noted that the only study citing the drowning of polar bears (four of them) blamed the deaths on a storm, not ice that is melting due to manmade global warming. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, furthermore, found that the current bear population is 20,000-25,000, up from 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and 1960s. Day says in Not Evil Just Wrong that the appeal to polar bears is “a very clever piece of manipulation.”

The claim: Global warming spawned Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The truth: “It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that,” Burton wrote in his ruling. A May 2007 piece in New Scientist refuted the Katrina argument as a “climate myth” because it’s impossible to tie any single weather event to global warming.

Al Gore launched An Inconvenient Truth at just the right time to exploit fears that Hurricane Katrina was a sign of things to come. Check his poster. And when a cyclone hit Burma, there was Gore again, picking over the corpses for more “proof” of his theory:

The 2007 and 2008 hurricane seasons had the least tropical activity in the Northern Hemisphere in 30 years, according to Ryan Maue, co-author of a report on Global Tropical Cyclone Activity.

“Even though North Atlantic hurricane activity was expectedly above normal, the Western and Eastern Pacific basins have produced considerably fewer than normal typhoons and hurricanes,” he said.

Maue’s results dovetail with other research suggesting hurricanes are variable and unconnected to global warming predictions, said Stan Goldenberg, a hurricane researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

One day many more people will look back and wonder how stupid they were to have been duped by such alarmists and carpetbaggers.

When viewed in historical context, and assessed against empirical data, the greenhouse hypothesis fails. There is no evidence that late-twentieth-century rates of temperature increase were unusually rapid or reached an unnaturally high peak; no human-caused greenhouse signal has been measured or identified despite the expenditure since 1990 of many billions of dollars searching for it; and global temperature, which peaked within the current natural cycle in 1998, has been declining since 2002 despite continuing increases in carbon dioxide emission.

Carter then lists the various influences, none of them healthy, that have convinced millions of Australians to believe in a theory that’s falling to bits.